Friday, July 10, 2015

Henry James as supermike

This summer I decided, once again, to go the eight rounds
with James’ The Ambassadors, a novel I have never been able to finish. This is
weird to me, since I am a great admirer of the late James, and in particular
the two novels associated with The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, which
preceded it, and The Golden Bowl, which came after it – speaking strictly in
terms of order of publication.

Of course, the late style is either damned for its obscurity
or praised for its epistemological complexity – but it is always there as a
fact, one of the stranger facts in American literature, to put besides Melville’s
style, and Faulkner’s. James managed, in
these late novels that were dictated to his secretary, to combine the diffuse
and the dense, and by their opposition and entanglement create those great
sentence-enigmas. James, by this point,
knew what he stood for ethically, aesthetically, and even, one might say,
ontologically – he stood for discrimination. By this, he meant a fidelity to
the adventure of perception, to the adventure of not missing things. The
problem is that too much perception seems to fatallly thwart the larger narrative
movement – or so say the haters. But to me, and to other Jamesians, the effect
is really to only that of making it necessary to subdue oneself to the peculiar
pulse and pattern of James’ telling. As Aubrey Beardsley supposedly said on his
deathbed, beauty is difficult – an ethos which, in Henry James, sometimes seems
to have been overused, as though the difficult were always beautiful. Still,
once you have the sound down, the novels go at a good clip. In fact, the
lentissimo introduced by certain curling and recursive passages becomes
something to look forward to, much as a kayaker looks forward to white water
downstream. The enigmatic sentences are sport.

Of course, this is not the whole story. The structures
wouldn’t work without their vicious little human interest at the base. What is
Wings of the Dove, in the end, but the story of a grift – Kate Croy’s beautiful
vision for all of Milly Theale’s gorgeous money? And what is The Golden Bowl
but a page six gossip item, quasi incest and full on adultery among the
wealthy? Intimacy, in James, is the prelude to betrayal. Treason is in the
blood – the close connections woven by family, old friendship, sex, and the inescapable
proximities of the house hold. For this reason, its turned out that James’s
works are really easy to turn into great television – they have a surprising
affinity to the soap opera. Although soap operas are teased for their grand
production of coincidences, those coincidences, too, are subordinate to the
violence visited by nearest and dearest one upon the other.

Unfortunately, this tabloid spirit is absent, or nearly absent,
as far as I can tell, from The Ambassadors. James was proud of this novel, his
last novel to be serialized in a major magazine – The Atlantic. I can just imagine the editorial conferences as the novel
wended its incomprehensible way through the issues. In this novel, James
finally exhausted his Racinian jones, his desire to create a piece of work that
left as many things as possible out. Discrimination is, after all, the art of
getting as much as possible out of a hint. And I can see the fun in that!

But still – the novel tends to defeat me by page one
hundred. It is a curious thing – ordinarily, novels that defeat readers defeat
themselves. James is right, though, that this rule is not universal. All of his
novels in one way or another press on the initiatory expectation that the
reader is never a passive recipient of the novel, never a mere consumer, a
like/don’t like automaton. Rather, the reader’s reflexes, his or her skills,
must be tested, must be ritually hazed, before he or she can be granted the
full force of the whole, impossible vision of life the novel delivers.
Impossible, in as much as it is fiction, and a whole vision, in as much as it
is art.

Sign me up! I usually think.

Well, this time around, I think I’ve finally figured out the
thing about the Ambassadors. Other novels of its cohort were written to
maximize the obliqueness of the prospect – but in this novel, James lets
himself go to the extent that he dispenses with “good” writing altogether – or if
not altogether, at least for large stretches. I noticed this early on – there’s a scene in
which Lambert Strether, our percipient in this book, meets Maria Gostrey, another
percipient. Percipients, in James’ novels, tend to associate in order to
conspire – and so these two do, almost immediately. Strether is on a mission
for the woman to whom, as we are not exactly told, he is betrothed, or at least
whom he is confident of marrying if he carries his mission out. This woman,
Mrs. Newsome, is a formidable widow, rich and rectitudinous, whose son Chad lives
in Paris with his mistress. Chad, so far, has preferred this life to a position
in the Newsome business. Strether’s mission is to separate Chad from Paris and
his mistress and pack him back to America. He is relying on help from Waymarsh,
a New England lawyer of the grand American type, who finds Europe uppity and
corrupt.

There’s the making of a good plot here. Patricia Highsmith
saw that and, with suitable alterations, made her first Ripley novel out of a
similar mission from America to Europe. But James’ adage, always dramatize,
seems to fail him here, partly because of what he does leave out.

But I am not going to go in that direction. Rather, this is the
passage where I got hooked on a different reading of this novel. The she
here is Maria Gostrey, the he Lambert Strether:

“She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the
reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk
from submitting to if he had fully suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he
was on the contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly
passive as might be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had
quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a
concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now
as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind his
eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his
face…”

Say what? I said to myself here. You could have plucked out
his eyes and their absense might almost have gone unnoticed?

Which makes me want to cry out: Everybody go, hotel motel holiday inn/
if your girl starts acting up, then you take her friend. Or something. Because
the hip has definitely gotten the hop on me, here. And then it dawned on me
that James, sly dog, was laying down a mandarin appearance that really
disguises a letting go of all the highly structured shit that went into
Victorian and Edwardian prose. As soon as it occurred to me that the
Ambassadors might be badly written, I began to see more possibilities in the
thing. More humor, more hidden intention, more self mockery.

Now I’m past the dangerous
100 page point, and so far the awfulness of the writing, under the beautiful
pretense, has called out to me again and again. I’m not sure what is up, but I
am beginning to think that James, for a change, is playing Supermike and
committing a long crime against his own style of art for the very hell of it.

All I'm here to do ladies is
hypnotizeSinging on and on and on on and onThe beat don't stop until the break of dawnSinging on and on and on on and onLike a hot buttered a pop da pop da pop dibbie
dibbiePop da pop pop ya don't dare stop

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.